Editorial: Mr. Obama's endless mission

Updated 11:18 am, Wednesday, May 9, 2012

These measures are worthy of approval now. We can wait until November to assess blame for an economy in need of revival.

The economy was not vastly better as President Obama returned to the Capital Region on Tuesday for the third time in less than three years to talk once more about getting the country back to work.

He came with a short list of very practical, if curiously modest, proposals to create jobs in an economy marked by troubling signs that recovery might come with a staggering cost: some 13 million Americans facing permanent unemployment.

He also came, of course, to persuade an audience far beyond New York's political comfort zone that he deserves re-election under circumstances that historically have had Americans ready to vote in a new president.

There's nothing really not to like about the job creation and other economic revival plans the President was pushing at the University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. The question is this: How well will they work, and how soon?

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Rewriting the tax laws to offer incentives for large U.S.-based companies to bring jobs back home, and to give them less reason to outsource the jobs in the first place, ought to be a given for an economic policy worthy of the 21st century. The same is true for tax breaks that encourage companies to conserve energy.

The President's push for tax incentives for companies that hire new workers, meanwhile, is an extension of a government program that has been paying off already.

Mr. Obama is quick to seize upon Republican resistance to his administration's policies. He's certainly not wrong to do so. The country will be in for a political crisis that rivals its economic crisis if tax cuts and tax incentives for businesses are doomed for purely partisan reasons. European voters are rejecting the political right's austerity policies, while the American right continues to block stimulus policies and push for deep cuts to programs that, for instance, feed homebound elderly, while supporting a wartime military budget in seeming perpetuity.

There will be no shortage of politicians voters can blame come November. The official unemployment rate then almost certainly will be around 8 percent. A more realistic measurement of those desperate for full-time jobs that just aren't there will be more like double that.

So why not give the people something to hope for now, and something to embrace, not just reject? It is time for Congress to act, not stall.

Mr. Obama's list has something for almost everyone. In addition to tax cuts and, just maybe, jobs, there's mortgage relief for the millions of responsible but struggling homeowners and another call to hold down interest rates on student loans.

If that's not enough, then we can expect political warfare worthy of the history books. But first, the President's reasonable agenda deserves a chance to succeed.